Sorn

Please don’t hate me for saying this, but how is your son calling someone else trash for saying something ignorant worthy of praise? I understand the sentiment, and in some ways I agree, but it’s important to teach kids that people, regardless of what they say, are people. Becoming a tolerant person isn’t easy, and I certainly wouldn’t want you job of raising a little boy to be a tolerant broad minded man. However, I do feel that implicitly rewarding bigotry or ignorance, with scorn and derision adds to the problem instead of taking away from it.

Em, let me caveat this by saying that I certainly wouldn’t want to say or imply anything about the values or the way in which you are raising your son. Only that we need to be careful that in climbing the ladder of tolerance that we don’t look down our noses at people who appear to be lower on the ladder than we are.

Well we talked about that, and agreed that “trash” was not perfect, and that under better conditions something else would be said, etc, and so on.

But I am very, very proud of the impulse and of the fact that he acted on it. The other kid was, among other things, arguing that gay people make a choice to be “that way,” and it’s sick, and so on and so forth — I don’t have too much problem with my boy insulting someone for saying things like that. I just don’t. There might be more effective ways to deal with something, but every once and a while, people have to deal with the fact that their ugly behavior leads to anger.

(And BTW, if it matters, the implication wasn’t “white trash,” because the other kid was African American).

Sorn

I want to say again that I didn’t mean to impugn anything you had said, or were trying to do. As I said it’s hard work to raise broad minded tolerant kids in a world which can be narrowminded and spiteful. I only wanted to make a plea for applying the same broadminded tolerance to those that at first glance don’t appear to deserve it. I don’t come at this from the same place most people do. My battles with prejudice, with hatred, especially self-hatred which is at the root of a lot of prejudice, are ongoing.Certainly I am more tolerant now than I was ten, five, or even two years ago, but I wasn’t always either so understanding or so ready to forgive. It’s hard to live in a world where one doesn’t quite fit, and all to often adolescents and young adults are at the mercy both of the poverty of their experience and the cruelty of the broader world. We don’t always know why people believe the things that they believe, but, looking back on my own life I can say that I wish more people had met my younger self with kindness. If they had maybe I wouldn’t have grown up to be so bitter and so determined as a younger man. All I wanted to do was to provide a bit of a perspective. As a young man I in all probably said something very similar given the severely religious nature of my upbringing and the paucity of other voices in my life before I left home. However, nobody ever had to tell me I was trash, at that age I knew things like that in my bones, and because I knew I was trash I treated other people like the garbage I thought I was.

Certainly, I aplaud your efforts and I think that you are doing a wonderful job in instilling in your son the needed values of tolerance, and understanding towards people who society marginalizes. I only wanted to put in a plea for understanding for someone who doesn’t seem right now like they deserve it. At various points in time in our lives we were all that person, closed off by ignorance or by fear, but somehow we managed to grow. If it wasn’t for my time in the service and my subsequent experiences in college and these long conversations with all of you I might still be the uncouth savage from eastern montana I was 10 years ago. But, somewhere along the way people cared enough to listen. All I wanted to do was to point out that it’s easy to have empathy for those who we sympathize with, but that if we are able we need also to have a measure of understanding for those, who on the surface, we cannot possibly comprehend. If we look close enough we can find those same faults in ourselves that we condem in others. There but for the grace of god go we.

I hope I didn’t offend you by posting this. The last thing that I would want to do is to offend someone who’s opinion I value so highly. Take care, and as I said I thihk you’re doing a fabulous job.

Captain Button

Speaking of GoT and gold, back in the reign of Aeyrs, the Seven Kingdoms had no debt and ran a considerable budget surplus. Was the occassional noble getting abducted, roasted, or strangled really such a high price to pay for fiscal responsibility?

There’s a headline at Slate today that reads “Doctor Who Helped Capture Bin Laden Jailed For Treason.”
I totally clicked to see how Doctor Who was involved in capturing Bin Laden, and if Clinton or Obama got to ride in the TARDIS.

dmf

chingona

For those who followed the saga of the missing cheese yesterday … this morning, the spot in the garden where I eventually found the cheese was considerably more dug-up this morning. I imagined the dog thinking, “Goddammit! I know I left that cheese right here. It has to be here somewhere!” Now you know how it feels, pup.

chingona

This goes to my first comment, but I’m not sure if it includes the thread (which is also pretty damn funny and includes a student-lounge in-joke.) Alternately, if you go to the very bottom of yesterday’s OTAN and scroll up, you’ll hit it pretty soon.

I’ll also note that a few weeks ago, when there was a discussion of your under-rated, every-day super power, I said my super power was finding things.

caoil

This month’s adventures in parents:
The bad: Mom needed back surgery to fix her sciatica.
The good: Surgery done, sciatica seems better.
The bad: Post-surgical infection with super-high fever, requiring readmission to hospital.
The good: Several days of antibiotics cleared it all up.
The bad: Almost as soon as she got home, my dad had some sort of near-loss-of-consciousness episode that meant *he* needed to go to emerg. And then be admitted. Turned out to be an infection, though mom & my sister think he wanted a little bit of attention too.
The good: My sister was there to be driving them back and forth while all this was happening. *whew*

caoil

I don’t think I would go so far as emotionally-balanced for my dad. Nah, just kidding. He’s doing pretty well for a chap of soon-to-be-82, especially since he’s had a few strokes and a couple of heart attacks in the last 10-15 years. He still makes jokes when we talk on the phone. Though we have to be careful how much we discuss hockey as it tends to make him mad & then his blood pressure shoots up.

efgoldman

Parents induce stress? Tell me about it.
I might have liked more than I had. My folks retired to FL, my dad died there, of non-Hodgkins (at 89). My mom ordered me not to go. [When my mom gave orders, you damned well obeyed – even though i was then almost 60 myself].
My mom moved back up to Boston, and lasted about six more years (93), and just started quietly slipping away, in skilled nursing care, a few weeks before she died.
They took this “don’t want to be a burden” thing seriously.

efgoldman

…though mom & my sister think he wanted a little bit of attention too.
Gawd. Six months post-stroke, I never want the ER kind of attention. i’d prefer to avoid it for the rest of my life.
Not that the after-admission kind of attention is anything to look forward to, either.

efgoldman

JHarper2

When I was quite sick this January my mother went and broke her leg by slipping on ice in the grocery store parking lot. One of the people who rushed to her aid was a First Responder who would not let her get up even though Mom was sure she was fine.
When the ambulance came, she insisted on going to the hospital where I get my treatments, rather than the closer hospital whose emerg was less backed up. She thought that would make things easier for me. Of course it took her two hours to remember that I had got her a cell phone with numbers programmed in just so I could be contacted in an emergency.
When I got done to the hospital, I was told by her I shouldn’t have come back to the hospital as she was sure she was fine and everything would be okay.
She had surgery the next day and was in rehab the day after. She was glad she made it easy for me to visit when I showed up with coffee every day as the hospital coffee was too weak and came once a day in small cups.
She is fine now, just some weakness and stiffness.

LizR

So you’d think I’m too young for this particular type of parent induced stress (I just grew out of the negotiating paying for college stage), but I guess not. My dad also has sciatica in his hips. Apparently in the last month it’s progressed to the point where he’s been barely able to walk, unable to walk up stairs, and unable to put on his shoes by himself. For a while there he was absolutely refusing to see a doctor about a upping the pain meds and scheduling a hip replacement or other relevant surgerical interventions, or even to apply for the clearly needed disabled parking permit. He would get close and then have one day out of every five or six where the pain wasn’t so bad and decide he didn’t actually need to go in.

He finally cracked last week and went to the doctor and applied for the parking permit. The new pain meds have switched his personality from supremely cranky and irritable to chipper, and he’s now happily plotting to use the parking permit to wage war on the travesty that is his place of employment’s lack of ADA compliance. The ADA situation there is ridiculously bad, like forcing people to take service elevators, only having ADA compliant bathrooms on the first floor, frequently locking the doors that do provide access to non-service elevators, and so on. There’s nothing my Dad loves more than a good bureaucratic fight, so this should be a nice way to occupy him leading up to any surgery that happens. But he’s not even sixty yet, and still having this type of stress about his own mom.

caoil

Sometimes you just want to say, oh, dads. It’s okay to ask for help! It’s okay to need help! Not everything must be weathered stoically!
Good that his attention is now on to making some positive changes, though.

Lizzou

Any word on the Egyptian elections? I hope they are going smoothly with only minor cases of Republican interference with voters stuck using provisional ballots. Or is that here in Florida? I do get those things mixed up…

dmf

To the driver with the Jesus fish on his/her van: I get that you love Jesus. I do, really, What I don’t get is why you’re in such a hurry to meet him, or so bound and determined to take as many other drivers with you as possible.

Captain Button

Justin

Went to a trivia night last night, and somehow won. I’m basing this on the fact that it’s perfectly reasonable for two twenty somethings to have exceptional knowledge of famous movie quotes and 60s pop culture.

David L

Just had a chat at work that ended with an agreement that we would work on something that’s in the category of things upper management would never approve because they don’t understand the technology well enough to see the point of it, even though we peons feel like it’s essential for the future of this organization. (For the nerd-inclined among you, the thing is web services.)

I haven’t felt this sneaky since a couple friends and I conspired to all have “doctors appointments” on the same afternoon back in high school.

efgoldman

David L

They might as well. This one, in particular, has an attitude that we should never write something when we can buy it. And then we spend more (wo)man hours and money getting the things he bought to talk to each other than we would have if we’d just set out to write our own.

LizR

This one, in particular, has an attitude that we should never write something when we can buy it.

Oh god. Especially for a small organization that sounds awful. I’ve heard stories of vendors being something like four months behind on deadline on producing what boils down to a basic web form and then getting cranky when the organization just has someone in-house write the thing in an hour.

snailspace

Yesterday’s good: Finished a kaffir lime vodka infusion. It tastes like a combo of citronella and Simple Green, but in the best possible way – citrusy, pine-y, herbal, and clean. I can’t wait to make summer punches with it as a key note.

Yesterday’s bad: The hound was bitten by a dog he’s known for years, and who I’d have sworn liked each other, but she took one look at him and went for him like a demon. Off to the emergency vet. Where they had evacated because of a natural gas leak. An hour later, got the leaky dog in to see a surgeon, and now he’s stitched up and on pain meds and antibiotics and getting lots of extra pats and treats and love.

efgoldman

koolaide

It is pretty amazing how that one close tag fail made everything else italics. I know nothing about such things but I’m guessing a similarly orphaned closed tag wouldn’t render all after it non-italics but I’ll but one here just for fun

efgoldman

Captain Button

Today in idle curiosity, I saw a defunct Blockbuster video store and wondered if the term went back indirectly to the racism-exploiting real estate scam. Wikipedia says not, it come from the blockbuster bombs of WW2, which were called that because they could supposedly destroy a city block.

So it is like the bikini, a swimsuit named after the island they tested h-bombs on. Eck.

dmf

Neocortex

Got back from the NATO summit protests in Chicago yesterday. I was a medic there, from Friday through Monday.

Anyone who says that the cops were peaceful is full of it. Anyone who engages in false equivalence between the cops and protesters is full of it. Anyone who says that the protesters were as a group violent or vandals or looking for escalation is full of it (there weren’t even as many isolated instances of such as I would have expected under the circumstances). I watched 50 or so marchers chant “Don’t touch the cars” in unison to shame somebody who was bothering a car stopped in traffic.

Anyone who says that the problems were all the fault of the black bloc is also full of it. I was with them for almost the entire CANG8/IVAW march. They were looking to be a protective barrier for other protesters, not to start a fight.

Here’s a story, from the police attack after the CANG8/IVAW march.

There was the hot area where beatings were happening. There was a park down the road where my medic buddy and I (and other medic teams) were taking serious casualties. Next to the park was a barricade, and behind the barricade were a couple hundred backup riot cops (CPD and Illinois Staties). We had to go by them when we went to and from the park. We were physically supporting this guy between us, who had a broken rib, possibly something cracked in his shoulder, mild shock, other injuries. As we took the guy by the backup riot cops behind the barricade, 100+ cops, in total unison, went “Awwww!” They were smiling. Some of them laughed. Then they went “Awwww!” again, and laughed a bit more. They did this four or five times in a row (the whole time we were taking the guy by them). I was calm before and after this, but during it, I was so shocked that I almost started crying right there in the street.

Here’s another story, from later on that evening. There was a guy who was thought to be an undercover or plainclothes cop (he had a baton) in the crowd. People were angry about the violence of that day and the day before, and got hostile and confrontational with him very quickly. I and two of the other medics escorted him across the crowd to the police line and safety. The cops out there that day might be inhuman. But I am not.

efgoldman

watson42

Thanks for the news from Chicago. My sister lives in the Near Eastside area and told me on Saturday it was like the area was on lockdown – police and other security people everywhere, barriers, road restrictions, the many, many police boats on the water, etc. She mentioned the CPD weren’t being exactly polite even in days leading up to the summit. She was seriously creeped out (and angered) by it – and she lived in NYC in Sept 2001 and its aftermath.

Neocortex

Yeah, the security was crazy. Cops with batons and other gear on most of the stations within the Loop (I really hated going back to my host’s house and having to be on the platform with them). Cops detaining, questioning, even cuffing people, because they thought they looked like protesters. Cops searching medics’ bags. Cops raiding the houses where livestreamers were staying.

Walking alone on the street made me paranoid, with all the cops around. I was afraid of getting detained. Or grabbed off the street. Or assaulted. I was glad that my host’s place was away from the downtown area, even if it meant it took longer for me to get downtown from there.

Other things I wanted to holler:
IF YOU CANNOT FIGURE OUT THE BYPASS TRAY ASK SOMEONE!

IF YOU CANNOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO JUST PRINT ONE PAGE AT A TIME WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO PRINT PAGE TWO ON A SEPARATE PAGE WHEN THE DOCUMENT IS ONE PAGE LONG?

WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO PRINT A LETTER SET FOR FORMAL LETTERHEAD ON THE INFORMAL LETTERHEAD AND THEN WONDERING WHY IT LOOKS FUNNY?? AN ADDUNEDUM–PRINTING THE NONEXISTENT PAGE TWO ON PLAIN PAPER WILL NOT HELP THIS PROBLEM.

sheesh!

efgoldman

Ya know what else? Once you click on the printer icon, you should wait around until the little “print” window pops up, and not walk away to get lunch.[someone I know very, very well does that from time to time, and then wonders where his fcking document is.]

efgoldman

Aaargh. Today. Colleague of mine ran a report, 100 pages++. Two copies (and it wasn’t even our department’s job).
It was a large (obvsly) Excel spreadsheet, except…. it was copied into our proprietary record- keeping software, in which you can’t edit images (she was actually printing an image of the spreadsheet, not the ss itself).
She works on a computer all day, has been for a decade or more, and is about as software-literate as the average spider monkey.
Of course, the first time she printed, she ran it in portrait, so the last two columns printed on (100++) extra pages….
I just can’t continue. Don’t want to raise my blood pressure. I almost wished i still smoked, so i could go outside for a butt.

chingona

What I’m about to write is somewhat disturbing, related to pregnancy and mental health issues. I don’t know if it merits a trigger warning or not, but consider this the warning.

On the scanner this morning, there was a call about a pregnant woman having some sort of breakdown in public. She was screaming, hitting her abdomen, yelling “I don’t want this,” and then ran away from the people that tried to check on her. When people talk about needing an allowance for late-term abortion in cases of threat to the mother’s health, and they include mental health in that, they aren’t talking about cases of being a little blue or a little stressed. They’re talking about cases like this woman, and others like her who are just as distressed, even if they are breaking down quietly and in private. I’m not saying she necessarily needs or should have an abortion. I feel pretty confident she needs significant intervention and that her pregnancy will have implications for the type of intervention she gets. (Do the drugs doctors would otherwise prescribe cause birth defects? Will the drugs and/or therapy be less effective as long as she is pregnant and subject to the associated hormonal changes?) Neither am I saying that late-term abortion presents an easy, open-and-shut situation morally and ethically. But when people dismiss “mental health” as just some excuse to get out of your “responsibility,” they are dismissing this woman and her pain. I really hope she is able to get whatever it is that she needs to find relief.

koolaide

It appears that my CSA farm is having a bumper year of onions. Many more than last year. I don’t tend to eat onions that often. I’m not a fan of them raw (in salads or sandwiches) nor do I tend to like them cooked on their own (like fajitas). I don’t mind them in soups/stews. Trouble is, I don’t cook soups/stews in the summer. So…

How can I prepare the onions that might like them that isn’t a soup/stew?

caoil

caoil

Sorry, koolaide, that was not a very well planned out sentence. I meant to imply that you could perhaps fry or caramelize the onions (and other veggies) and then cook up some sauce. Then you could do a big round of canning.

koolaide

caoil

Hm. What I like to do sometimes is chop up potatoes, carrots, broccoli, and onions, drop on a few pats of butter, cover it with foil, and bake for …eh, probably 35-40 minutes on something close to 400F. Of course, you have to have your oven on, which you might be trying to avoid.
I think one or two of the ‘Clean’ recipes I had last year involved onions. If I remember when I get home, I’ll come back & give it to you.

chingona

What about fried onions as a garnish? A lot of onions cooks down quite a bit.

I use a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking, and she calls for using them on top of various dal (lentil) recipes, but basically, you slice them in 1/4 inch slices and fry them until golden brown in a lot of oil. Drain on a paper towel. They can be stored for later once they cool.

MightBeLying

Dex

I guess I’m not 100% certain what “on their own” means, as a fajita has multiple other ingredients and the onions are a garnish, so feel free to ignore this recommendation…

Yucatecan pickled onions are bloody amazing. They’re cooked twice to mellow them out and speed the pickling process. Add vinegar and a bunch of spices and they are easy and delicious. You parboil them once, then drain, then bring them to a boil with the flavoring/pickling ingredients. My guess is this would remove some of the onion-y sulfurous quality that you may not like. The recipe calls for mellower red onions, but I would also try it with white onions if you’ve got those as well.

n.b.: I tend to add a little sugar and also tend to add more spices than what it calls for. It’s a very forgiving recipe and you should adjust to taste based on your preferences.

I recently made a double batch and then just threw them in jars where they will keep in the fridge for quite a few weeks. Awesome as garnish for burgers, dogs, tacos, gyros, pretty much anything that you put stuff on.

koolaide

I don’t dislike them cooked if they’re in small pieces and not the feature/primary ingredient of the dish. Onions in chili/soup/stew? No problem. Onions in meatloaf? No problem. For whatever reason, my mouth does not appreciate large pieces of onion (as in fajitas).

Katryzna

You can chop them and put them on pizza, not as an addition but as the main topping.

You can bake them into an onion casserole.

You can make a hobo stew with onions, hamburger and green pepper and whatever else you want to throw in.

You can bake or grill them with butter and a beef bullion cube. (Quarter them almost all the way, through, put the butter and cube in the center, and wrap with aluminum foil. Now put on grill or in oven.)

You can slice them and slice some cucumbers and put them in a sweet vinegar to soak. They should float in the sweet vinegar. Refrigerate so that they get cold and serve as a side.